Explore the New Popular Edition Series

Surveyed during 1914-1948, and published 1945-1948. Scale is 1:50,000.

The New Popular Edition captures the ever-changing landscape of Britain
at a crucial time in its history. The inter-war years arguably saw the
emergence of ‘modern’ Britain. The patterns of development and transport
links these maps reveal are in many cases familiar to the contemporary
eye. Much, however, was about to change, in particular the suburban
encroachment into the countryside and the further expansion of the
road network. The Popular Edition is a potent record of the Britain
that was about to be traded for the motor car. By an irony, it also
provided the British with their first motoring maps.

A sample from a 1:50,000 scale New Popular Series Map.

The problem of surveying and recording Britain’s ever-changing
landscape – one inhabited by over 50 million people by 1951 – had been
exercising the minds of the government, the military and the Ordnance
Survey ever since the completion of the Popular Edition in the late
1920s, although the cartographic ambitions of these parties did not
always coincide.

The Fifth Edition of the 1930s was the result of
various experiments of projection, sheet lines and styling which
ultimately proved unsuccessful and the project was abandoned in 1939
with only a small number of sheets having been produced.
Its replacement, devised in 1938, but delayed by the war, was the New
Popular Edition, which first went on sale in 1945.

Initial publication was completed in 1947, but sheets covering south-east
England, including London, were republished with road and other revisions
(including bomb damage in the capital) between 1947 and 1950. The New Popular
Edition was a mixture of Fifth Edition-style material in southern England
and ‘old’ Popular Edition material elsewhere, with subsequent revision. It
was eventually superseded by the Seventh Series between 1952 and 1961.

The New Popular Edition was in many ways a departure from previous Ordnance
Survey series. Although still produced at the one-inch scale, it included
(as recommended by the Davidson Committee in 1938) a metric National Grid.
It was also the first series to incorporate Scotland as well as England and
Wales using a consistent numbering system (although the Scottish sheets
were not published), and was the first to be produced in portrait rather
than squared or landscape format, with sheets of 45km x 40km.

The New Popular Edition was not produced from any one revision designed for
the creation of the series and so is something of a hybrid: cartographically
a stepping stone between the iconic Popular Edition of the 1920s, and the
Seventh Series of the 1950s and the metric-scale 1:50,000 maps that
followed from it. They provide a record of the country in the immediate
aftermath of the Second World War and on the threshold of great social,
economic and environmental change. Many rural areas were almost unchanged
compared to how they appeared a century or more before, while many urban
centres were industrialised, overcrowded and heavily bomb-damaged. Open
countryside was still commonplace across the country as a whole, but was
fast being eaten into by the suburban sprawl of large cities. The railway
network remained intact, but Dr Beeching’s axe was only a decade or so away,
as was the opening of Britain’s first motorway, the M1.

Key for New Popular Edition Maps, as displayed on Folded Sheet Maps.

These maps, produced just after the Second World War, show that travel by
road was now the dominant method of transport. Ministry of Transport
classifications were now specified for roads, which were now numbered.
Note also the new of symbols describing with the equally recent proliferation
of the telephone and the wireless.

The New Popular Edition captures all this ‘raw material’ which planners and
developers in subsequent decades were to use, for better or for worse, to
create the Britain that we know today.